Known mostly for his over-the-top Rajnikant extravaganzas, Sivaji and Enthiran, S. Shankar has had a much longer career as director. He’s even strayed away from Tamil and made a Hindi film with Nayak, and he’s made plenty of bizarre Tamil films in the past too. One such is the 2005 film Anniyan, which I have…
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This song from the 1981 film Yaarana has a special memory for me. While the song itself is a great little melody, what first comes to my mind is the way my parents described me singing the words to it when I was a kid, rather than what they actually are. While this doesn’t spoil…
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Jo haal dil ka is a very strange song. It’s strange only in the context in which it is presented. After all, heroines in wet, clingy clothes, mouthing sensual songs near waterfalls and other convenient water features is hardly strange for a Hindi film; It’s par for the course, but this song has no attempt…
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There isn’t enough that can be said about SD Burman‘s talent as a music director. He brought to it an old-school class and memories of folk music and classical music, while also imparting it with a surprising modernity. What he also did on occasion was to sing his own songs for films, with a voice…
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Hindi films have always been very fond of having songs which have a hidden meaning to the audience and some of the players on screen, but seem perfectly innocent to everyone else. I’ve spoken before of the typical Hindi film party song, with words that do everything from profess love to mock the antagonist of…
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As a singer, KK is one of those hidden gems. Not that he is unknown by any means, but over more than a decade, he’s sung some of the most iconic songs of Hindi cinema, while always remaining a fairly low profile character. His singing has a versatility and a certain heart-wrenching quality that none…
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As much of a startling change to the landscape of Hindi film music as A.R. Rahman was in the mid-1990s, his transition from Tamil films to mainstream Hindi cinema was also a gradual one from the audience’s perspective. He only showed up on the average film-fan’s radar with the release of the Hindi dub of…
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The clichéd ‘running around trees’ Hindi film song was made possible by that other strange practice that’s quite unique to Indian cinema, playback singing. As long as some much more talented singer was sitting in a studio singing their heart out, it allowed the actors to get up to all sorts of antics on screen…
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Being one of only three of the dozens of major Indian languages I can claim to know, I’ve always been curious about Marathi cinema. I watched my fair share on the TV in the good old days of Doordarshan, but all that taught me was that I was almost always in for either utter tragedy…
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Hemant Kumar, while never gaining the sort of insane popularity as other playback singers of Hindi cinema during his time, always had a unique presence. On the surface, the slightly quivering quality of his voice set him apart from the rest, but beyond that, he had a honest cadence and a truly emotional delivery that…
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As a band, the major members of Indus Creed had been creating and putting out music since 1984, albeit under a different moniker. But they really came into their own as Indus Creed and with the help of the unstoppable juggernaut that was satellite music television in India in the mid-1990s. When they released their…
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Chhoti Si Baat is one of my favourite romantic comedies, if not one of my favourite films of any kind in any language. So, it is inevitable that the songs of the film also hold a special place in my heart. Na jaane kyun hota hai yeh zindagi ke saath, the closest thing the film…
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